Display double encoded string as HTML from XML source using XSL

Question

I have a source of XML that contains content that I need to display in a web page as HTML using XSL. One of the XML nodes contains a double "HTML encoded" value. This is the one I need to output HTML for.

So the original HTML input was hello world but it is then stored as twice HTML encoded text.

original version: hello world
first HTML encoding: hello world
second HTML encoding: &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hello world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

I receive only this second HTML encoding from my XML source

<CONTENT>
   <RECORD>
      <OVERVIEW>&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;strong&amp;gt;hello world&amp;lt;/strong&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;</OVERVIEW>
   </RECORD>
</CONTENT>

Outputting to html in the XSL using xsl:output gets things started, and disable-output-escaping in my xsl:value-of tag gets me past one layer of HTML encoding.

But the following XSL:

<xsl:for-each select = "//CONTENT/RECORD">
   <xsl:value-of disable-output-escaping="yes" select = "OVERVIEW" />
</xsl:for-each>

Returns only:

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;hello world&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

It doesn't get me all the way back to the original input hello world

So I've been looking for a way to "double" or "disable-output-escaping="yes" twice.

Any ideas how I can do this just in XSL?

Max Toro Max Toro · Accepted Answer · 2011-10-06T18:14:07

My understanding is that you cannot use disable-output-escaping twice in XSLT, this is a serialization option that does not affect the transformation process. You can annotate an output node not to be escaped when serialized, and that's it. If you need to double unescape you need to pre-process the input document, or use an extension function.

Display double encoded string as HTML from XML source using XSL

2 Answers